A major objective of the interview was to determine to what degree so-called “Big Data” can be used to help find the right candidates fill leadership and managerial positions in companies.

Instead of giving us all sorts of ways in which Big Data is helping to do that, Mr. Bock focused instead on the limitations. And in the process, he revealed that Google has made attempts to harness more experiential data to come up with more effective hiring practices. Here’s what he said:

“We’ve done some interesting things to figure out how many job candidates we should be interviewing for each position, who are better interviewers than others, and what kind of attributes tend to predict success at Google.

On the leadership side, we’re looking at what makes people successful leaders and how we can we cultivate that.”

“We found that brainteasers are a complete waste of time. How many golf balls can you fit into an airplane? How many gas stations in Manhattan? A complete waste of time. They don’t predict anything. They serve primarily to make the interviewer feel smart.”

And about GPA stats, Bock revealed that after all of the data crunching, Google’s HR department came to this conclusion:

“GPAs are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless – no correlation at all, except for brand-new college grades where there’s a slight correlation … we found that they don’t predict anything.

After two or three years, your ability to perform at Google is completely unrelated to how you performed when you were in school, because the skills you required in college are very different. You’re also fundamentally a different person. You learn and grow. You think about things differently.”

So now Google has reverted to the tried-and-true formula of structured behavioral interviews, consistently applied across all applicants.

This includes using standardized behavioral questions to listen to open-ended responses, which then makes it possible to see how candidates actually interacted in real-world situations, as well as what they consider to be “easy” or “difficult” situations in which they found themselves.

Regarding leadership qualifications, according to Bock, Google has found that these are ambiguous or amorphous characteristics:

“For leaders, it’s important that people know you are consistent and fair in how you think about making decisions, and that there’s an element of predictability. If a leader is consistent, people on their teams experience tremendous freedom because then they know that within certain parameters, they can do whatever they want.”

Where “big data” comes in to play here is in twice-a-year employee surveys that Google conducts on all of its managers, evaluating a variety of factors.

Those factors are the fundamental ones — things like sharing information, treating all team employees fairly, and providing clear goals and performance standards.

But Bock cautions that leadership success is highly dependent on the context; what works at one company isn’t necessarily right for another firm. “I don’t think you’ll ever replace human judgment and human inspiration and creativity,” he notes.

I was pleased to read these comments, because I always felt that attempting to develop a radically new paradigm for job hiring, while being an interesting and novel endeavor, was also somewhat presumptuous on the part of Google.

At the end of the day, human nature is what it is: fickle, unpredictable, fallible. No amount of “re-engineering” is going to change that.

Who hasn’t ever interviewed someone and known within the first minute or so that the meeting was going to be a complete waste of time?

[Then the fun part was having to make inconsequential small talk for the rest of the interview just to appear civil!]

Unfortunately, this scenario happens more often than we’d care to admit. And considering the effort involved in planning and conducting phone or in-person interviews, it’s a major waste of time and resources.

But now a company has come along that harnesses the Internet and camera technology to offer a different approach that I find pretty intriguing.

It’s as simple as posing a few questions on the Ziggeo site … then providing a Ziggeo link to the interested parties for them to respond.

Job candidates simply click on the link to receive the questions. They respond with short video recordings, which the HR manager can view at his or her convenience. It’s an efficient and inexpensive way to prescreen job candidates in the very first stage of the interview process.

Since most people have video capabilities embedded in their digital devices these days, they can respond easily without being impeded by a lack of technical tools. And if candidates balk at participating … chances are those people wouldn’t have ended up on the short-list of finalists anyway.

Ziggeo has also incorporated a simple “rating” functionality into its system to make it easy to grade the quality of video responses, which would come in handy for people who are evaluating a large number of candidates.

I think this is a great way to separate the “wheat from the chaff” when it comes to people selection. Plus, we get to see how people are responding to our own specific questions … not having to rely just on resumes, covers letters and the like.

While job applicants are probably the biggest potential uses, there are numerous other applications of the Ziggeo approach. I can see it being used to screen all manner of people:

Interns

Casting calls

Babysitters

Adult/senior caretaking

Roommates and apartment mates

Ziggeo can also serve as a quick, easy and affordable method to “vet” video testimonials and media interviews.

The Ziggeo Pro premium-level service levels goes a lot further than that, allowing for hundreds of videos up to 15-minutes in length plus multiple screening rooms, which should prove most popular with hiring practitioners and human resources departments at large companies.

I don’t have personal experience with this tool myself, but it seems like its positive attributes as a “first sort” for personnel selection would far outweigh any negative aspects.

What experience have readers had with Ziggeo or similar video screening services? Would you recommend using them, or are there drawbacks? Please share your comments here.

As those of us in the world of business begin to add years (or decades) to our tenure, it becomes easier than ever to look at the younger crop of workers coming onstream and see traits that don’t align with our worldview about what is acceptable, “SFW” behavior.

Perhaps we’re too set in our ways. Maybe we’re not being flexible enough or making a sufficient effort to keep an open mind about proper office professionalism and etiquette.

But maybe we’re not offbase after all: A new survey of HR professionals suggests that others have also noticed — and they’re not very forgiving, either.

In fact, this survey of ~400 human resources managers, which was conducted by the Center for Professional Excellence at York College, found that opinions of recent college graduates in the workforce have grown more negative over the past five years. (The survey is conducted annually.)

When asked about their experiences in recruiting and hiring recent college graduates, these HR managers were pretty unsparing in their criticism. Here are some of the opinions the survey uncovered:

More than one-third of HR respondents felt that the level of professionalism among new college-educated employees has worsened over the past five years.

Nearly half believe that the work ethic of new employees is worse today than before.

More than half of the respondents feel that new workers come into the workforce with an unrealistic air of entitlement.

What are some of the specific areas where HR managers see new hires failing to measure up? These were the most prevalent mentions in the York survey:

Appropriate appearance and dress

Punctuality and workplace attendance

Attentiveness

Staying on-task through to completion of assignments

Honesty

And that’s not all.

The human resources professionals in this survey reported that younger employees “appear arrogant” during the hiring process and once they come on the job.

Moreover, these HR professionals contend that new employees aren’t taking proper cues from older, more established workers in the office, but instead from their peers and friends.

A manifestation of this is the predilection to text co-workers rather than to communicate via e-mail messages, or through personal conversations and interfaces.

The basic problem with the attitudes of new company hires was pointed out by Deborah Ricker, director of the Center for Professional Excellence: “Acceptable behavior among peers is not necessarily acceptable among coworkers and superiors.”

Most of us can probably think of one or two examples of employees who personify many of the issues brought up by the HR managers in the York survey.

One example that comes to my mind from our own office’s experience was a young worker who decided she needed to take short naps during her lunch periods.

Nothing really wrong with that, except … she did so by lying down on the floor next to her desk — which was directly behind another worker’s cubicle. Imagine trying to do your work while having someone snoozing (snoring) at your feet!

If you have similar anecdotes about some of the younger hires in your office, feel free to leave a comment. It’ll be good for a chuckle or two – even if there’s an underlying context that’s way sober.

Facebook has overtaken MySpace and other sites to become the largest and most popular social networking choice for young and old alike. And while LinkedIn still maintains an edge over Facebook as a professional networking resource, Facebook has done a very effective job in blurring the lines between personal and professional social interaction on the web.

The latest development that proves this is the increasing popularity of company “fan” pages on Facebook. Anyone can start a fan page showcasing a company they know and love … and many employees have taken the opportunity to create pages for their own organizations. My own company, Mullin/Ashley Associates, is no exception. Currently, Facebook offers more tools for uploading interesting content such as photo galleries and video clips, along with providing a great platform for news updates, wall postings and chat.

Going further, some companies have elected to turn Facebook into their vehicle of choice to promote themselves to prospective employees. Posting videos of employees talking about their positive work experiences … including pictures of the office environment … showcasing employee events … all of this brings a company to life far more effectively than just by advertising open positions on web job boards such as Monster.com.

The beauty of using Facebook in this manner is not only that companies can make a bigger and better impression, but they can do it without having to incur any significant cost. And if it’s done particularly well, it might even result in lower costs, as fee-based recruitment ad placements can be reduced or even eliminated.

Increasingly, people are being connected through social networks, and this phenomenon will only grow in the months and years ahead. In such an environment, companies that champion “content, creativity and community” will be the winners. That goes for hiring, as well.